Ones in Suits

MONDAY PUZZLE — The thing I love about words is that they are perfectly willing to stand up to any task you set: You can mince them, you can paint pictures if you have a thousand of them, you can even have your way with them[Hey now! — Ed.] [Fear not, it’s the name of a radio show. — D. A.].

The constructor Zhouqin Burnikel knows this, so she has decided to shuffle her word deck, so to speak, and see what comes out. What we have is a lovely, straightforward, Monday solve with a bit of wordplay that is entertaining. If you are just getting started as a solver, it’s the kind of thing you might want to take note of; I believe it truly increases one’s puzzle-solving enjoyment.

Today’s Theme

At first, I couldn’t remember what the name for this sort of wordplay was — one word friend suggested that they might be spoonerisms, which is close, but not really correct. A spoonerism of 17A’s STARES DOWN would be “Dare’s stown.”

What we actually have are words whose orders are swapped to make new phrases, so that STARES DOWN becomes 63A’s DOWNSTAIRS. There are three more pairs just like that in the puzzle, but I’ll leave those for you to find. It’s more fun that way.

Another friend, a member of the National Puzzlers’ League, says that the name the organization has given this bit of wordplay is — brace yourself, this is some heavy lifting — a “phonetic transpogram.” It’s very descriptive for this theme. And it just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?

Tricky Clues

■ 36A: I’m sorry, but everyone knows that the answer to “Goat’s cry” is not MAA. It’s “Bob!” or “Ed!”, and they poignantly call out to each other for help, as shown in this video:

■ 69A: “Ones in suits?” sounds like we are thinking of business executives, but not today. Today, we are thinking of playing card suits. Depending on the game you’re playing, ACES can have a value of one.

■ 2D: I should have known this, and yet I didn’t. The ALTA ski area in Utah has been in The New York Times Crossword 281 times, and I always forget it (Most prominent excuse: I don’t ski. Ever. And no thank you, I’d rather not talk about it.) I did have AL_A and didn’t have the theme yet, though. Must ... commit ... to memory ...

■ 24D: Question to crossword constructors over the age of 40: How is FEEL ME making its debut in The New York Times Crossword today as slang for something else when we have had this inspiration for the last 47 years? Stop slacking and get back to work:

■ 55D: Geeky Historical Side Note: The Disney film “MOANA” came out in 2016, yet XWord Info indicated that the name had been used before, before Will Shortz becoming crossword editor in 1993. How is that possible, you ask? Could there have been another “MOANA”? There was, but this one was male, and the film was a 1926 silent “docufiction” about life — more or less — on the South Sea island of Savai’i created by Robert J. Flaherty, who had also created the 1922 feature “Nanook of the North.” The story of how this unlikely filmmaker wound up helping to create the documentary genre is interesting and you can fall down the rabbit hole with me by clicking here.